Afghanistan: for those for whom it is not over

No doubts here: Joe Biden was to right to take the political hit (if any) for ending our Afghanistan war. The major media have been giving lots of space to tired old war horses like Condoleeza Rice and Leon Panetta to whine -- but most people in the U.S. are done with this.

Of course Afghanistan's war is not over for many Afghans. The bracing Vietnamese-American essayist and novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen brings his life experience to this moment:

I was 4 years old when Saigon fell, so I do not remember any of it. I count myself lucky, since many Vietnamese who survived the end of that war were greatly traumatized by it. ... For [many Afghan] civilians, the war hasn’t ended, and won’t end for many years. ... 

... History is happening again, and again as tragedy and farce. The wars in Vietnam and Afghanistan happened as a result of American hubris, and in both cases Americans mostly focused on the political costs of war for them. But in each case, the Vietnamese (and Laotians, Cambodians and Hmong) and then the Afghans have paid the much greater toll in human suffering. In April 1975, the United States recognized its moral responsibility and evacuated about 130,000 Vietnamese people, and then accepted hundreds of thousands more from Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia in subsequent decades. This is what must happen now, and anything short of such a vision of responsibility and hospitality will compound the American failure in Afghanistan. 

... Tens of thousands of Afghans believed in the American promise of ushering in freedom, democracy and an open, tolerant society. And now, they’re stuck. For Afghans, the war hasn’t ended simply because we, the United States, declared it to be over. The nightmare doesn’t end for Afghans after the last American leaves. Our obligation to help Afghans in mortal danger extends beyond the present moment and well into the years ahead. ...

A friend, who also escaped from Vietnam in 1975, watches and feels impotent pain:

What is happening in Afghanistan resonates with me deeply. 1975 - that was when I left Saigon amid chaotic scenes at the airport, when my British father had minutes to get us out, keys left in the car on the airport tarmac... I was a mere baby at the time, but I do not underestimate the impact this whole scene is [having] "again". It saddens me a lot to see this. ... What happens now in Afghanistan is anyone's guess. I am saddened by the situation, for the Afghan people, for the women. They have been abandoned.

San Francisco-based Afghan-American writer Tamim Ansary has written several books trying to explain his country of origin to his adopted one. In 2014 he offered this in Games without Rules describing what he considers the Afghan predicament:

... the country experienced a series of incursions emanating out of Europe, which gave rise to a maelstrom of conflicting currents. Within the country, the multitudes whose cohesion derived only from traditional tribal and Islamic values expected their rulers to honor and defend those values with their lives and to otherwise leave them alone. Afghan rulers could not simply comply, however, for looking outward they always saw two or more well-equipped Western goliaths facing off against each other, with hapless Afghanistan situated between them on their line of scrimmage. ... 

Trying to negotiate between the local and global forces, between the inner and outer worlds, put Afghan rulers in a double bind. Anyone who wanted to rule this country had to secure the sponsorship of the strongest foreigners impinging on the country at that moment; yet no Afghan could rule this country for long without the allegiance of the country's deepest traditional forces. … The same thing is happening again now. ...

Internal contradictions fester and lead to a

... burgeoning chaos that saps [the invaders'] resources, leaving little time or strength for carrying out the original intentions of the intervention, whatever those were. The problem is not that Afghans unite and then cannot be conquered; the problem is that Afghans fragment and then cannot be governed. The great powers have a stake in making Afghanistan more governable, but the only people who can achieve this happy result are Afghans -- because it depends on the resolution of contradictions within Afghan culture.

Ansary concludes:

Afghanistan is not really impossible to conquer. It's just that all the successful conquerors are now called "Afghans."

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Today I find myself feeling slightly at sea, unmoored. No wonder. I've realized that I've been agitating, organizing, demonstrating, and praying for the end of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Afghanistan for more than a quarter of my life.   I don't remember feeling quite this way in April 1975 when we were chased out of Southeast Asia; at that time I'd been a semi-adult skeptic and then opponent of the Vietnam war for ten years. Its duration had seemed forever, but I was young and soon found other demons to joust with.

As it happens, I'm reading about the fall of Saigon in Elizabeth Becker's You Don't Belong Here about three women journalists who broke into war reporting in the U.S. Indochina wars. It's a heck of a companion story to the current moment. It takes me back into that other war which formed the shameful backdrop of my youth.

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If people in this country want to help the Afghans whose war is not over, I urge support for the International Rescue Committee which has worked in the country for 30 hard years.